days of my hives

I recently recovered from a nasty bout of hives.  They appeared and disappeared in various places on me for about two weeks, and have vanished as mysteriously as they came.  During the two weeks, however, when I did not know that they would vanish, I racked my brain trying to think of what was new in my environment that could have caused them.  The only thing I could come up with was some sort of seasonal mold.

We got rid of a wool carpet, and I ceased all laundry operations in the basement, but nothing really helped.

Then one morning I walked out the back door into a yard filled with tiny, papery mushrooms, like Japanese parasols.  I had never seen them before, and it put me in mind of a single solitary mushroom I had seen last year growing under our hammock.  It was red with white spots, just like in German picture books for children. Apparently those are the most poisonous, but Germans have never been known for pulling their punches when it comes to scaring the pants off of children in story form:

Anyway, the mushrooms are gone and so are my hives. 

Comments

[kip]

my german grandfather introduced me to that same evil, almost hallucinatory book. the illustrations accompanying the story of the kid who wouldn't cut his nails still give me the jibblies - in fact, i could never progress beyond reading that story, so i have no recollection of the story with and illustration of a hostile, bespectacled rabbit trying to gun down some poor fellow whose only avenue of escape is to fling himself down a well while emitting a massive fart, squidlike, in order to cover his escape. plus, the rabbit almost looks like he's smoking a cigarette, doesn't he?

[Kristina]

Remember mum used to read this to us? I could never tell if she thought it was instructional or funny. So here is her reaction when I bought it for B, thinking it was funny? "Oh, how could you? Such an awful book! It will give him nightmares. Put it away right now!" B found the rabbit story the most hilarious.

[thegirl]

Of course I remember this book, and my feeling about this as well as many intrinsic parts of childhood is how do children EVER learn to make sense of the world? Remember the song she used to sing about the deer who offers safe haven to a little rabit who is being chased by a hunter? Wouldn't they just be a bigger, doubly delicious target for him? And how did a deer learn to build a house?